Installing from the WW2.4_Ubuntu8.04_LiveDVD

Overview

After installing from the WeBWorK Live DVD which only requires a few steps, you will have a full fledged Ubuntu 8.04 system with WeBWorK, Apache2, lighttpd, MySQL, etc. installed and configured. If your network uses DHCP, networking will be automatically configured for your system. If it uses static IP addresses, you will have to configure networking (see below). Also it is imperative that you CHANGE THE PASSWORDS for the OS users root and ubuntu (which has sudo privileges) and also for the WeBWorK users admin and ubuntu which have professor privileges (see below).

If you try this, I would appreciate any comments, suggestions, bug reports, etc.

Verify the MD5 checksum of your downloaded file and then burn it to a DVD (the file is too large to be burned to a CD).

Running directly from the Live DVD without installing

You can run WeBWorK directly from the Live DVD without installing anything on your computer. However for some reason when you do this, the system can not access the CSS style sheets so all the pages look very bad. I haven't traced down why this happens --- if you know what the problem may be, please let me know (it may be do to lighttpd not working correctly from the DVD) So this is not a good way to try out WeBWorK but if you want to anyway, here's what to do. Note that when actually doing an install from the Live DVD, this problem does not occur (very strange).

Place the installation DVD in your DVD/CD drive and reboot your computer from the DVD drive. You may have to press <F12> during the boot process to bring up a boot menu which will allow you to select booting from the DVD. Or you many have to edit the BIOS to select the DVD as the first boot device.

First select Start WeBWorK Live DVD in Graphical Mode, the first option, and then hit <Enter>.

Log in as "ubuntu" with the password "admin"

Open Firefox and access the URL: http://localhost/webwork2 . The admin course has two users "admin" and "fedora" as professors with passwords "admin" and "admin". myTestCourse has the same two users as professors and in addition practice (guest) users and one student user "jsmith" with password "jsmith". With the exception of jsmith, every password on the system is set to "admin"

Install WeBWorK from the WeBWorK Live DVD

Place the installation DVD in your DVD/CD drive and reboot your computer from the DVD drive. You may have to press <F12> during the boot process to bring up a boot menu which will allow you to select booting from the DVD. Or you many have to edit the BIOS to select the DVD as the first boot device.

First select Install WeBWorK Live DVD, the third option, and then hit <Enter>. After the system loads you will be presented with a series of 7 steps. .

On the first install panel hit Forward to proceed with English as the selected language

Select a city in your time zone and hit Forward

Hit Forward to accept the default keyboard layout

Next comes the Partition disks pages. You should be able to accept the defaults unless you want separate partitions for various directories. You might want to look at the Partition disks section in Installation_Manual_for_2.4_on_Ubuntu_8.04 which gives more information on this

The next panel asks "Who are you?". We will fill in this information but actually it will not be used. The real information is contained in the WeBWorK Live DVD. We will just repeat it here so you don't get confused

Enter Ubuntu for "What is your name?"

Enter ubuntu for "What name do you want to use to log in?"

Enter admin twice for the password

Enter WeBWorK-DVD for the name of the computer

You can change all of these things after the installation takes place. Especially you should change the password

Then hit Forward to continue

On the Migrate Documents and Settings page just hit Forward to continue without importing anything

Finally hit Forward on the Ready to install page to begin the installation. The Advanced... button on this page gives you options on installing the boot loader but you almost certainly want to use the defaults

Now sit back and relax while the installation takes place. Some of the steps (especially around 94%) can take a long time. Please be patient. When your finally see "Installation complete" hit Restart now.

Boot your server

Remove the WeBWorK Live DVD and press <Enter> to continue

Hit <Enter> to select the default boot option or just wait for it to boot

Log in as "ubuntu" with the password "admin" (more on accounts and passwords below). "ubuntu" has sudo privileges. The "root" account also has password "admin" but you can not log in as "root" on the log in page (you can su to "root" in a terminal window).

You can open Firefox and access the URL: http://localhost/webwork2 . The admin course has two users "admin" and "ubuntu" as professors with passwords "admin" and "admin". myTestCourse has the same two users as professors and in addition practice (guest) users and one student user "jsmith" with password "jsmith". With the exception of jsmith, every password on the system is set to "admin"

If your network uses DHCP, networking will be automatically configured for your system and you should be able to access the web with Firefox. If not, see below.

Passwords

It is imperative that you CHANGE THE PASSWORDS for the OS users root and ubuntu (which has sudo privileges) and also for the WeBWorK users admin and ubuntu which have professor privileges both in the admin course and in the myTestCourse. Otherwise anyone can connect to your server and pretty easily gain root access.

To change the root password open a terminal window by clicking Applications, Accessories and then Terminal. Enter

Setting up networking using a static IP address

The server is set to accept only www (http) and secure telnet and file transfer (ssh) connections. Here we give directions for setting up an ethernet connection if you are using a static IP address. If your network is set up using DHCP you can skip this section.

Further test Apache by connecting to
"http://localhost/server-info" using a browser on your machine and you will see a page listing various
information about Apache. In particular under Server Settings you should see

Global Configuration

Most WeBWorK configuration is done in the file /opt/webwork2/conf/global.conf. This file provides system-wide configuration settings, and defaults for course settings. Any setting in this file can be overridden in the course.conf file for a particular course. To override a setting for a course, just put the new setting (using the same syntax as is in global.conf) in the course.conf file.

There are several options that must be set for WeBWorK to work with your system. The rest of the file consists of customization options. Now edit global.conf

WeBWorK uses the DateTime module. DateTime is supposed to be able to determine the local timezone itself without you having to enter it but this often fails so it is best to just set it here. For is a list of timezones recognized by DateTime go to
http://search.cpan.org/dist/DateTime-TimeZone/ . These timezones are more refined than standard timezone usage in that they include switches to daylight savings time (e.g. some parts of a time zone may make the switch and others may not). For example if your server is in the eastern US, on the list you will see DateTime::TimeZone::America::New_York and you should replace $siteDefaults{timezone} = ""; by $siteDefaults{timezone} = "America/New_York";

Search for $siteDefaults{timezone} = "America/New_York"; and enter your local timezone if it's different.

WeBWorK sends mail in three instances. The PG system sends mail to report answers to questionnaires and free-response problems. The mail merge module is used to send mail to course participants, i.e. to report scores. The feedback module allows participants to send mail to course instructors.

To send mail, WeBWorK needs the address of an SMTP server. Normally you will use the address of your school's SMTP server. If the local machine is running an SMTP server, use localhost. IMPORTANT: Our instructions above did not install an SMTP server so you will have to install and configue one if you do not use your school's SMTP server. When connecting to the SMTP server, WeBWorK must also send an email address representing the sender of the email (this has nothing to do with the From address on the mail message). Edit the lines

appropriately removing the # and using the professor(s) actual email address(es). In order to have professors from individual courses receive such email, this
should be set in course.conf to the addresses of professors of each course.

Finally we have to replace localhost in two places by your server's fully qualified domain name, something like your_server_name.department.school.edu. Search for

File and Directory Locations

This installation of WeBWorK and Ubuntu follows the instructions given in Installation_Manual_for_2.4_on_Ubuntu_8.04 implementing Optional A and B but not C.
You can look there to find the locations of the WeBWorK files. All system files are in their standard Ubuntu locations.

Connect to WeBWorK through an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) with an https: URL

If you want student and professors to connect to WeBWorK through an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) with an https: URL follow the instructions in
Installation_Manual_for_2.4_on_Ubuntu_8.04#Implement_Optional_C_.28SSL.29. The main thing one has to do is to generate a self-signed certificate which is something you have to "sign" yourself with you server's fully qualified domain name.